Download or read book A Reader s Guide to James Merrill s The Changing Light at Sandover written by Robert Polito and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An invaluable road map for the epic poem of our time

Download or read book The Changing Light at Sandover written by James Merrill and published by Scribner. This book was released on 1982 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mystical poems explore the author's experiences communicating with a spirit named Ephraim through an Ouija board

Download or read book The Changing Light at Sandover written by James Merrill and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2019-11-27 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Merrill’s audacious and dazzling epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, remains as startling today as when it first emerged in separate volumes over a period of several years. Individual parts won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and the entire poem, when it was collected into one volume in 1982, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is now an American classic, here in a definitive new hardcover edition that includes Voices from Sandover, Merrill’s recasting of the poem for the stage. The book carries us to the scene of Merrill’s Ouija board sessions with his partner, David Jackson—the candlelit Stonington dining room with its flame-colored walls and the famous Willowware cup they used as a pointer in their occult travels. In a shimmering interplay of verse forms, Merrill set down their extended conversations with their familiar and guide, Ephraim (a first-century Greek Jew), W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, Plato, a brilliant peacock named Mirabell, and other old friends who had passed to the other side. JM (whom the spirits call “scribe”) and DJ (“hand”) are also introduced to the lonely eminence God B (“God Biology”), his sister Mother Nature, and a host of angels and lesser residents of the empyrean who are variously involved in the ways of this world. The laughter, the missteps, and the schoolroom frustrations of the earthly pair’s gradual enlightenment make this otherworldly journey, finally, and utterly human one. A unique exploration of the writer’s role in a postatomic, postreligious age, Sandover has been compared to the work of Yeats, Proust, Milton, and Blake. Merrill’s tale of the joys and tragedies of man’s powers, and his message about the importance of our endangered efforts to make a good life on earth, will stand as one of the most profound experiences available to readers of poetry.

Download or read book The Book of Ephraim written by James Merrill and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time in a stand-alone edition, the acclaimed poet's classic poem about his communication with Ephraim, a guiding spirit in the Other World, is here introduced and annotated by poet and Merrill scholar Stephen Yenser. "The Book of Ephraim," which first appeared as the final poem in James Merrill's Pulitzer-winning volume Divine Comedies (1976), tells the story of how he and his partner David Jackson (JM and DJ as they came to be known) embarked on their experiments with the Ouija board and how they conversed after a fashion with great writers and thinkers of the past, especially in regard to the state of the increasingly imperiled planet Earth. One of the most ambitious long poems in in English in the twentieth century, originally conceived as complete in itself, it was to become the first part of Merrill's epic The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), the multiple prize-winning volume still in print. Merrill's "supreme tribute to the web of the world and the convergence of means and meanings everywhere within it" is introduced and annotated by one of his literary executors, Stephen Yenser, in a volume that will gratify veteran readers and entice new ones.

Download or read book The Changing Light at Sandover written by James Merrill and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2020-12-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Merrill’s audacious and dazzling epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, remains as startling today as when it first emerged in separate volumes over a period of several years. Individual parts won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and the entire poem, when it was collected into one volume in 1982, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is now an American classic, here in a definitive new hardcover edition that includes Voices from Sandover, Merrill’s recasting of the poem for the stage. The book carries us to the scene of Merrill’s Ouija board sessions with his partner, David Jackson—the candlelit Stonington dining room with its flame-colored walls and the famous Willowware cup they used as a pointer in their occult travels. In a shimmering interplay of verse forms, Merrill set down their extended conversations with their familiar and guide, Ephraim (a first-century Greek Jew), W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, Plato, a brilliant peacock named Mirabell, and other old friends who had passed to the other side. JM (whom the spirits call “scribe”) and DJ (“hand”) are also introduced to the lonely eminence God B (“God Biology”), his sister Mother Nature, and a host of angels and lesser residents of the empyrean who are variously involved in the ways of this world. The laughter, the missteps, and the schoolroom frustrations of the earthly pair’s gradual enlightenment make this otherworldly journey, finally, and utterly human one. A unique exploration of the writer’s role in a postatomic, postreligious age, Sandover has been compared to the work of Yeats, Proust, Milton, and Blake. Merrill’s tale of the joys and tragedies of man’s powers, and his message about the importance of our endangered efforts to make a good life on earth, will stand as one of the most profound experiences available to readers of poetry.

Download or read book The Lyric in the Age of the Brain written by Nikki Skillman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-06 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science has transformed understandings of the mind, supplying physiological explanations for what once seemed transcendental. Nikki Skillman shows how lyric poets—caught between a reductive scientific view and naïve literary metaphors—struggled to articulate a vision of consciousness that was both scientifically informed and poetically truthful.

Download or read book James Merrill written by Langdon Hammer and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2015 with total page 978 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A biography of the acclaimed poet James Merrill"--

Download or read book James Merrill Postmodern Magus written by Evans Lansing Smith and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2008-09 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the unique voices in our century, James Merrill was known for his mastery of prosody; his ability to write books that were not just collected poems but unified works in which each individual poem contributed to the whole; and his astonishing evolution from the formalist lyric tradition that influenced his early work to the spiritual epics of his later career. Merrill's accomplishments were recognized with a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for Divine Comedies and a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 for The Changing Light at Sandover. In this meticulously researched, carefully argued work, Evans Lansing Smith argues that the nekyia, the circular Homeric narrative describing the descent into the underworld and reemergence in the same or similar place, confers shape and significance upon the entirety of James Merrill’s poetry. Smith illustrates how pervasive this myth is in Merrill’s work – not just in The Changing Light at Sandover, where it naturally serves as the central premise of the entire trilogy, but in all of the poet’s books, before and after that central text. By focusing on the details of versification and prosody, Smith demonstrates the ingenious fusion of form and content that distinguishes Merrill as a poet. Moving beyond purely literary interpretations of the poetry, Smith illuminates the numerous allusions to music, art, theology, philosophy, religion, and mythology found throughout Merrill’s work.

Download or read book Precipitations written by Devin Johnston and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2002-06-24 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charts the influence of occultism on America poetry from WWII to the present.

Download or read book Gale Researcher Guide for After the Broken Home Robert Lowell Anne Sexton and James Merrill written by Alan Feldman and published by Gale, Cengage Learning . This book was released on with total page 13 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gale Researcher Guide for: After the Broken Home: Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and James Merrill is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

Download or read book A Whole World written by James Merrill and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • The selected correspondence of the brilliant poet, one of the twentieth century's last great letter writers. "I don't keep a journal, not after the first week," James Merrill asserted in a letter while on a trip around the world. "Letters have got to bear all the burden." A vivacious correspondent, whether abroad, where avid curiosity and fond memory frequently took him, or at home, he wrote eagerly and often, to family and lifelong friends, American and Greek lovers, confidants in literature and art about everything that mattered—aesthetics, opera and painting, housekeeping and cooking, the comedy of social life, the mysteries of the Ouija board and the spirit world, and psychological and moral dilemmas—in funny, dashing, unrevised missives, composed to entertain himself as well as his recipients. On a personal nemesis: "the ambivalence I live with. It worries me less and less. It becomes the very stuff of my art"; on a lunch for Wallace Stevens given by Blanche Knopf: "It had been decided by one and all that nothing but small talk would be allowed"; on romance in his late fifties: "I must stop acting like an orphan gobbling cookies in fear of the plate's being taken away"; on great books: "they burn us like radium, with their decisiveness, their terrible understanding of what happens." Merrill's daily chronicle of love and loss is unfettered, self-critical, full of good gossip, and attuned to the wicked irony, the poignant detail—a natural extension of the great poet's voice.

Download or read book Ideal Minds written by Michael Trask and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-15 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the 1960s, that decade's focus on consciousness-raising transformed into an array of intellectual projects far afield of movement politics. The mind's powers came to preoccupy a range of thinkers and writers: ethicists pursuing contractual theories of justice, radical ecologists interested in the paleolithic brain, seventies cultists, and the devout of both evangelical and New Age persuasions. In Ideal Minds, Michael Trask presents a boldly revisionist argument about the revival of subjectivity in postmodern American culture, connecting familiar figures within the seventies intellectual landscape who share a commitment to what he calls "neo-idealism" as a weapon in the struggle against discredited materialist and behaviorist worldviews. In a heterodox intellectual and literary history of the 1970s, Ideal Minds mixes ideas from cognitive science, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, deep ecology, political theory, science fiction, neoclassical economics, and the sociology of religion. Trask also delves into the decade's more esoteric branches of learning, including Scientology, anarchist theory, rapture prophesies, psychic channeling, and neo-Malthusianism. Through this investigation, Trask argues that a dramatic inflation in the value of consciousness and autonomy beginning in the 1970s accompanied a growing argument about the state's inability to safeguard such values. Ultimately, the thinkers Trask analyzes—John Rawls, Arne Naess, L. Ron Hubbard, Hal Lindsey, Philip Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Edward Abbey, William Burroughs, John Irving, and James Merrill—found alternatives to statism in conditions that would lend intellectual support to the consolidation of these concepts in the radical free market ideologies of the 1980s.

Download or read book Familiar Spirits written by Alison Lurie and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2002-02-26 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alison Lurie, one of America's greatest novelists, has written a loving memoir of world-famous poet James Merrill and his longtime partner David Jackson. Drawing on her forty-year friendship with Merrill and Jackson, Lurie reveals the couple's deep involvement with ghosts, gods, and spirits, with whom they communicated through a Ouija board. Among the results of their intense twenty-year preoccupation with the occult is the brilliant book-length poem "The Changing Light at Sandover", which Merrill called his "chronicles of love and loss." Recalling Merrill and Jackson's life together in New York, Athens, and Key West, Familiar Spirits is a poignant memoir infused with great affection and generous amounts of Lurie's signature wit.

Download or read book The Poetics of the Everyday written by Siobhan Phillips and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wallace Stevens once described the "malady of the quotidian," lamenting the dull weight of everyday regimen. Yet he would later hail "that which is always beginning, over and over"--recognizing, if not celebrating, the possibility of fresh invention. Focusing on the poems of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill, Siobhan Phillips positions everyday time as a vital category in modernist aesthetics, American literature, and poetic theory. She eloquently reveals how, through particular but related means, each of these poets converts the necessity of quotidian experience into an aesthetic and experiential opportunity. In Stevens, Phillips analyzes the implications of cyclic dualism. In Frost, she explains the theoretical depth of a habitual "middle way." In Bishop's work, she identifies the attempt to turn recurrent mornings into a "ceremony" rather than a sentence, and in Merrill, she shows how cosmic theories rely on daily habits. Phillips ultimately demonstrates that a poetics of everyday time contributes not only to a richer understanding of these four writers but also to descriptions of their era, estimations of their genre, and ongoing reconfigurations of the issues that literature reflects and illuminates.

Download or read book Theory into Poetry written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-05-20 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the beginning of the 21st century, there is still no generally accepted comprehensive definition of the lyric or differentiated modern toolkit for its analysis. The reception of poetry is largely characterised either by an empathetic identification of critics with the lyric persona or by exclusive interest in formal patterning. The present volume seeks to remedy this deficit. All the contributors ‘theorise’ the lyric to overcome the impasse of an impressionistic and narrowly formalistic critical debate on the genre. Their papers focus on a variety of different questions: the problem of establishing a framework for definition and classification; the search for dynamic and potent critical approaches; investigations of poetry's cultural performance and its fundamental relevance for the construction of group cohesion. The essays collected in this volume offer a consciously polyphonic range of theories and interpretations, suggesting to the reader a variety of theoretical frameworks and practical illustrations of how a discussion of poetry may be firmly grounded in modern literary theory.

Download or read book Mysticism in Postmodernist Long Poems written by Joe Moffett and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written from a literary critic’s perspective, Mysticism in Postmodernist Long Poems borrows insights from Religious Studies and critical theory to examine the role of spirituality in contemporary poetry, specifically the genre of the long poem. Descending from Whitman’s Song of Myself, the long poem is often considered the American twentieth-century equivalent of the epic poem, but unlike the epic, it carries few generic expectations aside from the fact that it simply must be long. This makes the form particularly pliable as a tool for spiritual inquiry. The period following World War II is often described as a secular age, but spirituality continued as a concern for poets, as evidenced by this study. These writers look beyond conventional faith systems and instead seek individual paths of understanding; they engage in mysticism, in other words. With chapters on H.D. and Brenda Hillman, Robert Duncan, James Merrill, Charles Wright, and Galway Kinnell and Gary Snyder, this study demonstrates how these poets engage the culture of consumption in the postwar years at the same time they search for opportunities for transcendence. Not content to throw over the earthly in favor of the otherworldly, these poets reject the familiar binary of the worldly and metaphysical to produce distinctive paths of spiritual understanding that fuel what Wright calls a “contemplation of the divine.”

Download or read book Word of Mouth written by Chad Bennett and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Word of Mouth brings together the insights of queer and lyric theory to tell the story of how gossip modeled forms of sociality and voice that poets experimented with over the course of the twentieth century. Through a set of case studies of culturally diverse American poets--Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Frank O'Hara, James Merrill, and others--who absorbed and contended with the loose talk that swirled about them and their work, the book argues that gossip became a vehicle for the performance of alternative sexualities and concomitant meditations on alternative modes of poetic practice. At the heart of this argument is a queer revaluation of modern lyric poetry. Attending to gossip's key role in modern and contemporary poetry enables a recognition of the unpredictable ways that conventional understandings of the modern lyric poem--as, for example, an utterance smudging the lines between private and public, knowing and unknowing, intimacy and strangeness--have been shaped by, and afforded a uniquely suitable space for, the expression of queer sensibilities. More than simply mapping a curious poetic mode, then, Word of Mouth contributes a crucial, and largely neglected, queer perspective to current lyric studies and its renewed scholarly debate over the practices and forms of lyric poetry. The book presents new and instructive queer contexts for understanding the influential formal achievements of Stein, Hughes, O'Hara, and Merrill, and uncovers the unexpected ways that the history of the modern lyric intertwines with histories of sexuality"--